Businesses store applications, information, and data across various lines of business (“LOB”) in a decentralized fashion. Typically, specific departments within each LOB are responsible for compiling, sorting, storing, and accessing the knowledge of the associates working within each department in the most effective way they see fit, if it is done at all. The applications, information, and data are neither stored in central locations, nor are searchable or usable for knowledge transfer and general education between departments and LOBs. Furthermore, when production incidents occur, the proper processes and fixes are not within the reach of each of the associates assigned to support the production incidents. Therefore, when an associate has a question outside of his/her department's own knowledge base, the associate makes inquires through calls or e-mails to a business's own call center or other support system, in order to find the appropriate answer or contact reference. Inquires are typically forwarded on to a group with the responsibility of escalating them to the appropriate business team. Subject matter experts can also be pulled into the inquire in order to explain the system architecture, and upstream and downstream system and customer impacts. When the incidents relate to small issues, the personnel necessary to troubleshoot and fix the issue may only be tied up for a short period of time, however this time could be avoided with a more efficient system. When the incidents are significant, the process can take weeks to resolve and involve personnel being sent on-site or communicating on the phone with associates for a considerable amount of time in order to resolve the incidents. This time intensive process removes key associates from their day-to-day responsibilities on a long term basis.
Each time an incident is escalated to a higher support level it costs valuable time and negatively impacts a business's customers. Typical knowledge management systems are personally based, in that they are dependent upon the knowledge levels of certain associates in various groups. Therefore, contacting the specific associates whenever an incident occurs is inefficient and far from a best practice. Employees using these systems respond reactively to any incidents and pull associates in a number of groups away from their normal roles, which translates into increased costs.
Furthermore, when audit reviews take place within a business, a significant manual undertaking must occur to collect the data and organize it in a meaningful way. This data collection and organization is followed by lengthy face-to-face meetings to review and analyze individual data in detail. Audit teams must do this on a LOB-by-LOB and department-by-department basis since most LOBs and departments organize and store their data and documents in different manners. Thus, it becomes particularly expensive and time consuming to audit different departments within an organization if the measuring metrics and processes are organized in a decentralized manner and are not standardized across the business. This problem increases exponentially as the size of the business increases.
There is no central location to house all of a business' critical data for the purpose of system documentation, statistical and other analyses, improving associate skill levels and education, etc. The decentralized approach may duplicate the efforts of associates, since they are not aware that process maps, procedures, data analysis, etc., may have already been developed independently by other associates. Without having the ability to first search in a centralized location for information, associates never know if their efforts are actually a waste of time and could be put to better use on a different issue.
Currently there is no system under which a business can store, generate, distribute, score, and track all of the knowledge generated by the associates of a business through one integrated system in a seamless manner.